Handling multiple (and conditional) procurement thresholds

[afomi]

Adding on behalf of user feedback:

Figuring out every municipalities’ threshold in their codes is confusing. For example, Salt Lake City’s discretionary threshold is $2,500 and the formal threshold is $40,000. How does Salt Lake City procure purchases between $2,501 and $39,999?

In San Francisco, the discretionary threshold is $10,000, the formal threshold rages from approximately $100,000 - $400,000 (its changes with CPI). Between $10,001 and the formal threshold, there are informal solicitations. Open Procure does not currently accurately reflect San Francisco’s thresholds.

How might we model this data in a way to better represent the domain being modeled?

PR https://github.com/munirent/openprocure/issues/24 adds formal_threshold, but there seems to be at least one more intermediary threshold to be represented. One option is adding another hard-coded threshold. Another is to abstract thresholds into a dataset of its own.

[alan707]

Ryan, This is a great point. We've been thinking about it as well. It is true that there are some agencies that have very complex and intricate procurement thresholds. And there are many others that have two simple ones like the ones currently on Open Procure.

When we launched Open Procure we thought of the project as a tool to simplify procurement limits and make them easier to find. But it surfaced other things. At the core, this could be used as a tool to show why it does not need to be super complex and complicated to have a simple limit. City of Philadelphia, for example, has one limit under which all purchases does not have to be competitively bid: $32k. I like that, it is simple and everyone understands it.

Should we try to accomodate all the different types of thresholds or should we create a standard based on simpler procurement limits, which a large number of agencies are already doing?

I'd like to see Open Procure become a standard where an agency can say: we have adopted the Open Procure 2 threshold standard to simplify our procurement process and bring more transparency in the way we do business.

What do you think?